With Saturday’s second consecutive one-run loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Dodgers are 16-26 against teams with winning records this season (12-23 against their six potential opponents in the National League playoffs).

They have won just one series on the road against a winning team this season, taking two of three in Washington last month. And they’ve taken just two series at home: two of three from the Giants in April and last week’s three-game sweep of the Angels.

But Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw attaches no significance to those results.

“It doesn’t matter if you have a good record against winning teams now. It matters if you can beat those teams in October.”

With the Dodgers the past two seasons, their record against winning teams wasn’t a good predictor of postseason success. Last year, the Dodgers were 26-33 against winning teams during the regular season – and lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the first round of the playoffs. In 2013, they had a winning record against winning teams (27-23) – and lost to the Cardinals in the NLCS.

“You can take whatever sign you want,” Dodgers manager Don Mattingly said. “You’ve got to win ‘X’ games to get to October. Then it’s whoever plays the best in a seven-game series. It doesn’t really matter what’s happened over the course of the season.

“You guys will all go through it and ‘Oh here’s the matchup’ and you’ll match up positions and match up the reasons why. Then it won’t really matter. It’ll be whatever happens on the field that night and who wins the game. Then it’ll be what happens on the field that night to win that game. I don’t think anybody is going to get to October and say, ‘Ooh, we didn’t really beat the good teams. We can’t win.’”

Mattingly does acknowledge that a good team can get away with things and still beat a bad team during the regular season – “No question,” he said after the Dodgers did just that in Philadelphia this week. But those mistakes get exposed against good competition – “100 percent,” veteran Jimmy Rollins said.

That’s why Rollins said he expected to learn a lot about how the Dodgers handled playoff-like matchups against the Pirates and Washington Nationals in this stretch of schedule.

“This time of year, playing against teams in it (the playoff race), it’s more of a character test,” he said. “You get to find out what we’re made of, who can control their emotions the best.

“You can’t learn who’s made of what until those things happen. It’s easy when everything’s good. You learn who you are when it can go either way. If we execute, great. If we don’t, it’s going to cost us a game. That’s when you learn who you are. It’s hard to learn who you are when you win, when everything goes right. You get a bigger characterization when things aren’t going right.”

SECOND-HALF PLAYER

Just before the All-Star break, Rollins expressed confidence that he would have a better second half than the career-low .213 average and .604 OPS he took into the break.

“Get on the grind,” he said. “The second half is my half anyway.”

The 36-year-old Rollins has been proving it since the Dodgers returned from the break. He has hit .260 (19 for 73) since the break. In nine games since Mattingly returned him to the leadoff spot, Rollins is 13 for 40 (.325), reaching base in each game while continuing to play solid defense at shortstop. Mattingly said Rollins’ leadership has become more evident as the season’s crucial weeks unfurl.

“I think you feel a real calm from Jimmy,” Mattingly said. “There’s no situation out there that is sneaking up on him. You see it at short. He’s got every throw in the book – from the spin to the turn. Whatever position he catches the ball, he’s got a throw from there. It’s kind of like that with his whole game. You see him on the field, he’s comfortable, he’s relaxed. A little more vocal as we get into the stretch here. It’s good to see.”

Bill Plunkett has covered everything from rodeo to Super Bowls to boxing (yeah, I was there the night Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear off) during a career that started far too long ago to mention and eventually brought him to the OC some time last century (1999 actually). He has been covering Major League Baseball for the Orange County Register since 2003, spending time on both the Angels and Dodgers beats.

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